Houseguest

 I had another moment where I thought, “Wow, Africa has changed me.”

There is a 3000L tank on a cement tower that supplies the water to our house. The tank is clear, so that you can see when the water is running low. The local government quit supplying our community water less than a year after our arrival in 2019. (Something about fixing a dam. The first people messed it up. The second crew hired worsened it.) So for a long time we were buying water from a big truck that would come and fill all our tanks for about $150. Early in 2021 John Campbell, another missionary near us, installed a pump into our hand dug well behind our house. It’s great! You run the generator and then the water goes into the tank. But now that we’re using the well, there seems to be an increase in algae growing in our tanks. This algae occasionally will come into the plumbing inside the house and clog our pipes that are cemented into our walls. This requires us to break the cement, find the pipe, change the section affected. Not fun. So we installed a mesh filter between our tank and the house. Intermittently the mesh will be overgrown with algae again and our water pressure is terrible. One shower doesn’t work, the other is a dribble. We run the shower for 30 minutes to fill one bucket to shower out of. Toilets take forever to fill.

Jump to last week. One of our dearest friends, an American Missionary woman who will remain un-named because I haven’t asked her permission to tell this story, is visiting for dinner. We tell her about our water troubles and she completely understands. She’s lived here a long time and is married to a Sierra Leonian. It got late and before taking the long bumpy drive home, she excuses herself to the bathroom. It was a lovely evening. As I get ready for bed, I use the toilet and see there’s still urine in the bowl. I am not in the least distressed (because water conservation is normal) and I’m actually quite pleasantly surprised. Now the toilet won’t be filling for 30 minutes making our bedtime routine impossible. She was such a considerate houseguest to not flush the toilet!

 

 

Here's a picture of me trying to clean out the algae from around a submersible pump in our tank. I'm not sure why Rachel is missing a shoe.